Introduction to the Dash Cryptocurrency – Part 3

As of the writing of this article in December of 2017, trading volumes for DASH are about $130 million a day. Market capitalization of the coin is about $9 billion. A DASH is valued at over $1,000, making it one of the most valuable cryptocoins currently in circulation. The community behind the coin is expanding steadily and the number of pages dedicated to the coin on various cryptocurrency forums, including BitcoinTalk, is constantly growing.

According to the plans of the creators of the DASH network, there eventually will be 18 million coins in circulation. Just like the Ethereum network, the DASH network adds a block every 2.5 minutes, which is 4 times faster than the Bitcoin network. What makes DASH different from both Bitcoin and Ethereum is that it has a 7.1% annual decrease in block rewards.

Reasons to try using DASH

Many people discover DASH after using bitcoin and realizing that the bitcoin network has its flaws, two of the biggest ones in the practical sense being high transaction fees and long confirmation times. With dash, the network quickly validates transactions, fees are reasonable and the network has successfully solved the issue of double-spending.

Supporters of many other cryptocurrencies, including Bitcoin and Ether, start hundreds of threads on forums and reddit to discuss issues that they have no direct impact on, such as block size and hard forks. This doesn’t happen with DASH because the developers and the supporters of the network are focused on improving the network and make it work better.

In a way, DASH is the first cryptocurrency that is also a decentralized autonomous organization with decentralized funding, governance and decision-making.

While DASH users and developers are always discussing improvements and subjects that they find important, the discussions are very different from the discussions about other cryptocurrencies because DASH has a way for its users to agree on a solution and then implement the solution. The 10% of the block rewards that go into the “DASH Treasury” then go directly into funding of the new developments and features.

Every masternode on the network has one vote in the process of the selection of proposals for implementation. If a proposal gets many votes, it becomes viable. If current proposals require bigger budgets that those that are currently available, only proposals with the highest number of votes proceed to implementation. Users who suggest projects get an opportunity to convince others about voting for the projects. One the community gives the project the votes and there are enough available funds, the network releases the funds automatically with the help of a super block that is generated every month. For example, in September of 2015, the network has spent $14,000 on new projects. As the community and user base have been growing, the network had months when it has spent over $600,000 on implementing suggestions from the users. These suggestions and implementations boost the value of the network and attract new users, which, in turn, increases the value of the DASH token and the positive cycle continues.

Sending currency anonymously

Many people think that all cryptocurrencies offer anonymity to its users, when in reality sometimes there’s no anonymity whatsoever. For example, if you see an organization asking for donations to a certain Bitcoin address, you can look up that address on the Bitcoin blockchain and see all the transactions for the address for yourself. This is possible because the Bitcoin network is a fully transparent network. While it does provide users with an option to create a new address each time they need to participate in a transaction, if a user uses the same address and you know the address, you can easily find all the transactions, dates and amounts for the address.

Dash network allows users to send payments completely anonymously by using a feature called PrivateSend. PrivateSend is based on the anonymization method called CoinJoin.

The idea for the method is very simple. It says that if you want to send an anonymous payment, you should find someone else who wants to make a payment at the same time and send your payments together. This way, it will not be possible to tell if it is one payment or several payments and who paid what amount. With a joint payment, there are multiple ways of joining inputs and outputs on a blockchain network, which means that the exact details of the transaction remain unknown to third parties even if these third parties see the transaction on a blockchain network. The Dash network is not the only network to use CoinJoin method. Other networks include SharedCoins, CoinShuffle, and DarkWallet.

The CoinJoin method increases privacy not just for users participating in an anonymous transaction, but also for every other user on a network because even with a transparent transaction between two parties there is no way to tell if the transaction is between two parties only.